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free disk space is reduced while copying over network

microsoft.public.windows.vista.performance maintenance

Note: I did post this in m.p.w.v.general yesterday, but I'm reasonably sure
it's been lost in the more mundane posts :-P

I have noticed that when I am copying or moving files from my Vista computer
to my file server my free disk space on the Vista system decreases. As my
disk in the Vista computer is rather tetchy to start with this is a point of
concern on my part, especially as the files that I am regularly moving about
can be quite large. This became problematic yesterday while I was copying a
file that was larger than my available free disk space. Running out of disk
space was not entierly bad, it was Vista not cleaning up whatever temporary
(and ~3GB short) file it was generating.

This resulted in a few initial minor problems as I could not move any other
files to free up a little disk space as the move process wanted to create
similar temporary files. The real fun started when I tried to run Windows
Mail to post and, being devoid of anything to write to, it promptly crashed
and nuked my existing settings. A while later explorer was restarted and
promptly crashed resulting in an infinite loop of: crashing, recovering,
failing to write some sort of file and crashing again. About then I stopped
entertaining the idea of rebooting - reasoning that if it was doing this
now, it would do the same or worse during a boot - and used an active RDP
session to my file server to delete the file I had copied from my Vista
computer (e.g. access through share, and delete original, not copy) which
fixed everything by deleting not only the 8GB file, but the 5GB 'temp' as
well.

I have had a bit of time to cool down, and reason that Offline Files is
likely the culprit. I have not had the time or opportunity to do any tests,
although I have disabled Offline Files in the hope that it was the problem.
I am not part of an AD, so I am assuming that this is not something like
Shadow Copy. Anyone know if I am on the right track, or have seen this
happen before? I am sure that I will encounter this again, and I would
rather know how to solve the problem in another way than to hope I can get
in through a back door and free up space I may not want to.